Mandarin Oriental Wants Its Hotel Restaurants to Beat the City's Best
Updated: 1 hour ago
On 2 November, Mandarin Oriental stopped using two words every hotel has used for decades: Food & Beverage. From now on the group calls that side of the business Restaurants, Bars & Experiences. It sounds like a change of label. I read it as a sign of where luxury hotels are going.
What Mandarin Oriental actually changed
The idea is simple. A hotel restaurant should stop behaving like a hotel "outlet", the room where guests eat because it is downstairs. Each restaurant and bar should have its own name, its own crowd and a reason to come back, and compete with the best independent places in its city, for locals as much as for guests.
The man in charge, Christian Gradnitzer, put it in one line: every venue needs an identity, an audience and a reason to return. The group backs this with a serious kitchen record. Across its hotels, its restaurants and bars now hold 33 Michelin stars. In Shenzhen, The Bay by Chef Fei has two stars and OPUS has one. In Guangzhou, Jiang by Chef Fei keeps two.
Hong Kong is where you will see it first
The test case is the hotel where the brand was born. Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong opened in 1963 as the first true luxury hotel on Hong Kong Island, and since 2025 it has been through a full renovation, with the public spaces redesigned by the French designer Hubert de Malherbe. When it is finished, the hotel will hold 14 restaurants, bars and experiences under one roof.
Two of them opened the same day as the announcement, and neither looks anything like a hotel buffet:
The Thistle and The Jade, a whisky lounge built around a floor-to-ceiling library of bottles from Scotland, Japan, Taiwan and India. Its name comes from a book edited by Maggie Keswick.
The Pizza Bar by Daniele Cason, a counter where the chef decides the menu and bakes in front of you, with a dough matured for 72 hours. Its sister counter at Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo was ranked the second best pizza in the world in 2025.
The pizza bar is the idea I find most fun. It works like an omakase: a Roman pizzaiolo, a small counter and the discipline of a Japanese chef's table. In a hotel, of all places.
Next comes Blake Foyer, a tea salon in the lobby inspired by the old Blake Pier, with tea sommeliers at the tables and a pianist from five in the evening. It opens on 4 December. Next door, on the 25th floor of Landmark Prince's, connected to the hotel by an enclosed walkway, Daniel Boulud has already opened Terrace Boulud, his first restaurant in Hong Kong.
The old rooms that already worked this way
The funny part is that this hotel has been doing it for sixty years. Some of its rooms were city addresses long before anyone called them experiences.
Mandarin Grill + Bar was born in 1963 as the Saddle & Sirloin, and it still cooks the old European way, over fire and smoke, with classic sauces. Captain's Bar has kept Hong Kong entertained for more than 60 years, with live music and classic cocktails. And the strangest room in the building is The Krug Room, built to feel like the inside of a train carriage, where dinner comes with Krug champagne.
Then there is Man Wah, the hotel's Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant, high up in the building with views across Victoria Harbour and the skyline. A Cantonese room in a Hong Kong hotel has to convince Hong Kong first, and that is the real test.
Mallorca next
The same thinking is going into new openings. At Mandarin Oriental Punta Negra, in Mallorca, Leña, Matsuhisa, Sobretaula and Jacinta are planned as part of the resort itself. The group describes them as a restaurant and bar destination of their own, built into the resort from day one.
My take: the best hotel restaurant is the one locals book
In most luxury hotels the restaurant is still where you eat when you are too tired to go out. You look at the menu in the room, you see the prices, and you go and find a place the concierge recommends somewhere else.
In the best hotels it works the other way round. The locals fill the room, and the guests feel they found the right address without leaving the building. I saw this at Four Seasons Bangkok. BKK Social Club is ranked among the best bars in the world, and it doesn't feel like a hotel bar at all. You go down for one drink and you stay far longer than you planned.
That is what Mandarin Oriental is trying to build on purpose, fourteen times over in one hotel. The group already has the designers and the chefs. What I'd watch is something harder: keeping every one of those rooms alive on a Tuesday in February, when there is no opening party and no press. A city restaurant survives only if the city comes back.
There is also a lesson for travellers. When you choose a luxury hotel, look at its restaurants and bars the way you look at its rooms. A hotel with a bar the city talks about gives you a better evening without a taxi, a reservation fight or a lost hour. For many trips, that is worth more than an extra ten square metres of suite.
What this means when you book
If you are going to Hong Kong this winter, the hotel will still be finishing some of its venues, and the full collection is due to be complete by the end of the year. Ask which restaurants are open on your dates before you plan your evenings around them.
At Luxintravels we follow hotels like this one closely, and through Luxintravels VIP, our private membership, members book the same rooms at private rates that can be up to 60% below the public price. More than 48,000 members already use it, in hotels across more than 150 countries.
So, the question I asked on LinkedIn, and the one I would ask you: in the last hotel you loved, did you eat in, or go out?
Written by Mirko La Rosa, founder of Luxintravels. He has reviewed luxury hotels from the inside for more than ten years, and he slept in every hotel reviewed on this site. More about Mirko.
